The smoke clears on our latest League Table to reveal a damaged landscape. Kemi Badenoch, on 63 points, and Penny Mordaunt, on 49.8, are the only Cabinet members who break the half-century barrier. Badenoch, second last month, is now first and Mordaunt, third last month, is now second.
The man who then pipped Badenoch to the top spot, James Cleverly, falls from first with 72 points to eleventh from bottom with 10.6 points. It’s fair to say that whatever you think of the new Home Secretary’s performance since he was appointed, pleasing Conservative activists seems to have been just about the last thing on his mind, for better or worse.
But the biggest news is that Rishi Sunak, whose ratings have yo-yoed around during the past few months, hits his lowest trough yet in the table. Last month, in our first survey since the Conservative Party Conference, he was on 7.1 points and ninth from bottom. The month before, in the wake of his Net Zero speech, he was up to 26 points and eighth. Three months ago, he was in the red on -2.7.
Minus 25.4 is a dire rating – though not as lamentable as the tooth-grindingly terrible -51.2 and -53.1 scores racked up by Theresa May and Philip Hammond in April 2019, let alone Chris Grayling’s record -71.6 score in the same poll. The fact is that during the last month every good piece of news for the Government has been followed by bad.
Inflation halved? The Supreme Court’s Rwanda judgement came only a few hours later. Autumn Statement? A day later came record legal migration figures. Many members of the panel will also have clocked the Prime Minister’s decision to cancel a meeting with Greece’s visiting Prime Minister over the Elgin Marbles rumpus. Labour leads by 19 points in Politico’s poll of polls.
“We are in a terrible hole,” Ken Clarke said of John Major’s Government during the mid-1990s. The same might be said of this one now. Compare and contrast this table with the first of this Parliament, returned by much the same panel in January 2020. Then, 17 Ministers broke the 50 point barrier, and Boris Johnson was on 91.6 points.
Five Ministers are now in negative ratings: four of these are familiar faces. Oliver Dowden (back in the red), Andrew Mitchell, Rishi Sunak – and Jeremy Hunt, whose Autumn Statement landed well with the Conservative media, but whose rating rises only from -23 to -13.4. Robert Jenrick is out of negative ratings, recording a lowly 6.6 from -8.9. Richard Holden gets no breathing space, coming in as Party Chairman at 3.6.
And David Cameron? He is welcomed back to the table with a negative score of -4.9. Some of this will be Leave-ish sentiment, some an unease about his record on China, some perhaps a memory of the Greensill saga. All rather unfair, in my view. But who am I to question that of the panel? Our Cabinet League Table question received some 750 replies.